Anthropocene: On Designing Nature, Design with Nature, Design for Nature, and Nature as Designer

In the Anthropocene so far, human societies have increasingly reshaped the natural world into the cities, farms, and other infrastructures that sustain us. All too often, this redesign and reengineering of the natural and hybrid human-natural world has proceeded without concern for preserving, sustaining and enriching nonhuman life and nonhuman habitats. As a result, these are becoming ever rarer and ever poorer. Design with nature has helped reverse this trend by incorporating the natural world into design projects as functional and aesthetic elements and even as a partner in the design process. Design for nature has produced reserves, parks, wildlife corridors, restoration projects, and other critical spaces for nature. But what of nature as designer? In all these designs, the human world is the designer, making the rules and enforcing them, while all the while, even within the places specifically designed to avoid this, our world intrudes unintentionally, often overwhelmingly, into the rest of life on Earth. Can the human world be redesigned and reengineered to regenerate and sustain wild places free of ongoing human interventions and influences, even while sustaining humanity at increasing scales? Can the role of nature as designer be radically expanded within an increasingly human world? It is time to break the Anthropocene narrative of an ever-expanding humanity presiding over an ever-declining nature. It is time to redesign and codesign landscapes and infrastructures that re-empower nature as designer in a hybrid human-natural world where humanity thrives together with nonhuman nature into the deep future.